Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Roach, Mary.

Packing for Mars: the curious science of life in the void / Mary Roach.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 978-0-393-07910-4

1. Space biology—Popular works. I. Title.

QH327.R63 2010

571.0919—dc22

2010017113

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

As when astronaut Mike Mullane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he’d like to have on his gravestone. Mullane answered, “A loving husband and devoted father,” though in reality, he jokes in Riding Rockets , “I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.”

Between the astronauts who used their status to win a place in the Senate and the senators who used their influence to win a spot on a NASA mission, there’s practically been a Senate quorum in space. (John Glenn managed to work it both ways, returning to space as a seventy-seven-year-old senator.) The gambit occasionally backfires, as when Jeff Bingaman defeated Apollo-astronaut-turned-New-Mexico-senator Harrison Schmitt using the campaign slogan “What on Earth has he done for you lately?”

It was a ten-hour flight to Tokyo.

I read an unedited draft of an oral history last week that had the “dangs” and “hells” inked out like operatives in a CIA dossier. When Gene Cernan responded to an Apollo 10 close call with “more than a few goddams, fucks and shits,” the president of Miami Bible College wrote to President Nixon demanding public repentance. NASA made Cernan comply. He got the last word in his memoir: “Bunch of goddam hogwash.”

A common theme throughout Russian-American space collaborations. NASA psychologist Al Holland tells the tale of driving a carful of Russians across Moscow during the Shuttle-Mir program. When the cars in his lane slowed to a standstill, a Russian man in the back seat asked, “What’s going on up there?” Holland was proud to be able to use a new vocabulary word: stopka —traffic jam. Only he used popka : “It’s a big rear end!”

Did she or didn’t she? Arresting officer William Becton wrote in his affidavit that he found a trash bag containing two used diapers inside Lisa Nowak’s car. “I asked Mrs. Nowak why she had the diapers. Mrs. Nowak said that she did not want to stop and use the restroom, so she used the diapers to collect her urine.” That’s what astronauts do—you can’t take a bathroom break on a spacewalk, so you wear a diaper inside your spacesuit.

Nowak later denied wearing diapers. She now says her family had used the diapers when Houston was evacuated during Hurricane Rita, two years earlier. If I were Nowak, I wouldn’t have worried about the diapers. I’d have worried about the buck knife, steel mallet, BB gun, gloves, rubber tubing, and large plastic garbage bags also found in her car. I’d be peeing my pants.

And to keep their distance vision from deteriorating. When your view extends no farther than a few yards, the muscles that squeeze the lens for near focus can eventually lock in a short-lived “accommodative spasm.” Submarine myopia is enough of a problem that submarine crews aren’t allowed to drive for from one to three days after coming ashore from a long assignment—a good idea for several reasons.

If the plants are edible, a conflict can arise. As much as astronauts miss nature, they miss fresh food. The diary of cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev includes a story about a batch of onion bulbs taken on board Salyut as part of an investigation of plant growth in zero gravity. “As we were unloading the resupply ship, we found some rye-bread and a knife. So we ate some bread. Then we saw the onion bulbs we were supposed to plant. We ate them right then and there, with bread and salt. They were delicious. Time went by and the biologists asked us, ‘How are the onions?’

“‘They are growing,’ we answered….

“‘Do they have shoots?’ Without any hesitation we replied that they even had shoots. There was great excitement at the communication station. Onions have never bloomed in space before! We asked to speak to the head biologist in private. ‘For god’s sake,’ we told him, ‘don’t get upset, we ate your onions.’”

Yuri Gagarin loved Soviet rocketry mastermind Sergei Korolev, though not in a space food tube sort of way. When searchers found Gagarin’s wallet after the fighter jet crash that killed him, there was just one photo inside (now on display beside the mangled wallet in the Star City museum). The photo is of Korolev—not Gagarin’s wife or child, not his beloved mother. Not even Gina Lollobrigida. “She kissed him!” said our ebullient museum guide Elena while fanning herself with a plastic fan as though overcome by the thought of it.

Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration. Eskimo hunters traveling alone on still, glassy waters are sometimes stricken by “kayak angst”—delusions that their boat is flooding or that the front end is either sinking or rising up out of the water. Of related interest: “A Preliminary Report of Kayak-Angst Among the Eskimo of West Greenland” includes a discussion of Eskimo suicide motives and notes that four out of the fifty suicides investigated were elderly Eskimos who “took their lives as a direct result of uselessness due to old age.” No mention was made of whether they cast themselves adrift on ice floes, as you sometimes hear, and whether travel by ice floe has its own unique anxiety syndrome.

It would have had to be affixed to a holder inside the helmet, just as in-helmet snack bars are. The snack bar, made of the same stuff as Fruit Roll-Ups, is positioned so that astronauts can simply bend their head down and take a bite. Or, as astronaut Chris Hadfield told me, bend their head and smear it on their face. The fruit bars are mounted alongside the drink tube, which tends to leak a bit, turning the fruit into a “gooey mass.” “We just stopped using them,” Hadfield said.

One self-help phobia Web site helpfully reassures the afflicted that “if you have no plans to travel into space… astrophobia may not significantly impact your life.”

Using—how cool is this?—a gravity meter. Walk over an area of very dense rock while holding one of these meters, and you can watch the pull of gravity increase. (Fluctuations in Earth’s density change its gravity enough to pull missiles off their trajectory by as much as a mile or so; gravity maps of Earth were once top-secret Cold War possessions.) This effect is lessened if the dense rock is a tall mountain and you’re four or five miles above the mean surface of Earth. If you carry a bathroom scale to the top of Mt. Everest, you may see that you actually weigh a tiny bit less, not counting the marbles you have obviously lost.

Or a space station garbage bag or a NASA spatula. When astronauts let go of objects, they become satellites for the few weeks or months it takes them to lose speed and fall out of orbit. The term “satellite” applies to any object orbiting the earth. The “spat sat,” as the orbiting spatula was known, had been used to test a spackling technique to fix dings in the exterior of the Space Shuttle caused by, ironically, orbiting debris. You don’t have to worry about being killed by falling spatulas or LSD gurus, because these things burn up when they reenter the Earth’s atmosphere. (Dr. Leary was recremated sometime in 2003.)